S. Awan is a failed journalist, a student of history, a lover of music, film, culture, and an enthusiast of the the controversial and the weird.
Also a musician, and part-time freelance, involuntary human being. Also occasionally lives on the moon. Also is a ghost. And a cigarette butt that hasn't been put out properly; so, you know, there's still, like, smoke coming out of it and stuff...

You will have seen the headlines over the last week, concerning the ‘evacuation’ of the White Helmets from Syria.

With the regime-change operation in Syria appearing to have stalled in either stalemate or failure (depending on who you ask), the Western-funded proxies had to be rescued – probably before Syrian government forces could capture them, torture them and also possibly find out where the group had come from, who was funding them and where their instructions were coming from.

Or, you know, maybe it is just a well-meaning humanitarian operation to rescue “heroes” from danger. If so, it’s a very selective one.

The extraction operation was apparently conducted by Israel and Jordan, but at the request of several Western governments who were apparently concerned for the White Helmets’ safety.

According to the BBC, the Israeli IDF – which has a history of aiding anti-government militias and fighters in Syria via the Golan Heights – said it was acting at the request of the UK, the US and other nations.

The Jordanian government, for its part, seemed to have been coerced into assisting the operation: the Jordanian statements suggest an unenthusiastic participation on behalf of its Western allies. Jordan confirmed it had “authorised the United Nations to organise the passage of 800 Syrian citizens through Jordan to be resettled in Western countries” – making it clear in its other statements that Jordan was not willing to offer asylum to any White Helmets members.

Which seems a smart precaution on Jordan’s part: and unsurprising – King Abdullah II is one of the most intelligent world leaders out there and he isn’t about to grant asylum to Al-Qaeda-linked operatives who could potentially start up trouble in his own country.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the rest of us.

A number of countries have said they’re taking in varying numbers of White Helmets and their families: this includes Britain, Canada and Germany. At the government level, this makes some sense: as the UK, along with France, seems to have been the key state-backer of the White Helmets activities in Syria.

The UK confirmed it would help with the resettlement, providing protection to “as many of the volunteers and their families as possible”.

So, here’s the alarm bell for me. This looks like a cut-and-paste re-run of MI6 and the UK’s Libya policy.

Recall that MI6 was financially supporting Libya-based jihadists for many years (principally the Al-Qaeda-linked ‘LIFG‘). Recall that, for years before the final regime-change operation in Libya in 2011, Britain quietly kept a community of Libyan jihadists IN ENGLAND (particularly Manchester) – and then, in 2011, facillitated their return to Libya so that they could take up arms against Gaddafi’s government.

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So, now, with the Syrian regime-change operation clearly either failed or stalled, we’re simply seeing proxy assets being offered the same asylum that the Libyan jihadists were.

An unspecified number of ‘White Helmets’ will be settled somewhere in the UK, quite possibly just kept here until some future date when the regime-change operation might be started up again. Note that MI6’s involvement with the Al-Qaeda group in Libya went back to at least 1996 (as far active assassination attempts on Gaddafi were concerned) – and they waited another 15 years or so before having another go at it.

So are we just going to keep these new ‘assets’ safely hidden in various Western locations for a few years… until the next project crops up?

What if they’re just being kept safe until some other regime-change operation entirely is underway in some other country? Then they can be inserted into the equation, rebranded under some new name and put back to work – with the same mass-media propaganda campaign rebooted to champion them as humanitarian heroes.

Vanessa Beeley was the first person I ever saw report on the White Helmets, way back in 2015. In that superb piece of independent journalism, she also wrote the following: ‘The NGO ‘soft power complex’ is now one of the most destructive global forces. It is employed as an interface between civilians of a target nation, with government, economic or military structures of the colonialist force intent on harnessing any given nation’s resources or undermining its geopolitical influence. The Democratization process, or the path to regime change is facilitated by these undercover government or corporate proxy employees who, once embedded into a society, set about producing the propaganda that will justify intervention, either economically, politically or militarily…’

In this article from June 2016, she also warned of the likelihood that the White Helmets operation, if successful, will likely be a template for further geopolitical deceptions beyond Syria. “If this latest mechanised ‘NGO’ blueprint is successful then we could see it being re-deployed as key to future neo-colonialist projects. The White Helmets are a direct intra-venus line into the terrorist enclaves within Syria, acting as a conduit for information, equipment and medical support to maintain the US NATO forces…”

I don’t have a great deal to add about the White Helmets themselves – I covered that fully here, as posted on 21st Century Wire, and in which I talked about ‘Syria, the Movie’. I relied heavily on Vanessa Beeley’s work for much of that: and it’s worth noting how much of a beating Beeley has come in for from mainstrean newspapers in the last year or so for her dismantling of the White Helmets mythology. But note that Beeley was writing about the organisation a significant amount of time before they started becoming a high-profile subject in mainstream media. Note too that Beeley, unlike the various journalists and platforms who’ve elevated the White Helmets to hero status, actually went to Aleppo and was on the ground in other Syrian towns.

Note also that newspapers rarely bother to ‘go after’ an indepedent journalist or even a ‘conspiracy theorist’ like that – so someone was clearly very uncomfortable with the extent to which the carefully constructed White Helmets movie extravaganza was being undermined.

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In a recent interview with The Corbett Report, Beeley further expresses her suspicions that the White Helmets project might now be about more than just Syria: “But I think what is interesting, why is this organization being protected to such an extent? I think it’s because the imperialist apparatus is defending the concept. We’ve already seen [White Helmets founder] James Le Mesurier recruiting in Brazil. We know that the White Helmets have appeared in Malaysia and in Venezuela, and in the Philippines…”

Note again that the Kingdom of Jordan has been clear it is not willing to house any White Helmets’ people within its borders, but only to hold them until Britain, Canada and the other states can resettle them: they clearly perceive the danger, because you’ll note that Jordan otherwise has granted asylum to a vast number of Syrian refugees.

There’s another point here too. As I noted after the Manchester arena attack last year, the alleged bomber Salman Abedi was from one of those Libyan Islamists and anti-Gaddafi families that had been given asylum in the UK. The extremists being kept in the UK for the purposes of overthrowing Gaddafi clearly had the potential to become a liability not just to the state of Libya, but to British citizens – in this case, young concert-goers.

Well, the White Helmets seem to belong to the same ideaology: having been found embedded with Al-Qaeda in Syria, as well as engaged in staging fake chemical attacks and the like.

Would they not be a safety liability wherever they happen to be settled in the UK or elsewhere?

Vanessa Beeley makes this point, in regard to Canada, in a recent entry at The Wall Will Fall. ‘That the Canadian government is planning to admit White Helmets personnel to Canada as refugees should gravely concern Canadians. These civil defence poseurs are ideologically committed to terrorism, personally connected to Al Qaeda, and have the blood on their hands of many Syrians whose country they helped to invade and occupy. The potential for them to cause harm in Canada is high…’

But here’s another thought. What if that’s the point?

We know that various governments or security services have quite deliberately facillitated acts of terrorism on home soil for various purposes. My own suspicion was that Salman Abedi was deliberately enabled to carry out his suicide bombing in Manchester – although it could also have been unforeseen blowback from the MI6/LIFG policy.

One has to ask why so much effort is being gone to for these White Helmets – given that there are surely all kinds of people in Syria who have been ‘in danger’ and could have, in theory, been evacuated to safety on humanitarian grounds.

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Think of how many people could’ve been rescued from the Islamic State Group, from Al-Nusra and other jihadist militias, from Iranian militias and Hezbollah, or, yes, even from the Syrian regime or Russian airstrikes. I’m not necessarily saying that would’ve been practical.

But yet, for the White Helmets, we see multiple governments scrambling to get them safely out and tripping over each other to offer them immediate asylum.

Isn’t that odd? It it just because the White Helmets are now a celebrity brand? Isn’t it a touch perverse, for example, that the UK – which has been very open about its reticence to grant asylum to innocent Syrian refugees fleeing the war – is nevertheless so keen to offer asylum to the White Helmets?

Odder yet is that the British government just broke with decades of principle and agreed to hand over two British ISIS members to the United States for probable execution – and yet, at the exact same time, was asking Israel and Jordan to liberate Al-Qaeda-linked White Helmets from Syria.

Does that make sense?

I suppose it only does if you believe the Nobel-Prize-nominated, Oscar-winning White Helmets – founded by an MI6 officer in Turkey – are actually the real deal: a noble, humanitarian group of “heroes” (according to Jeremy Hunt) who risked their lives to save thousands of people.

I don’t: but I accept that a lot of people do.

Interestingly, the Israeli statements had initially put the numbers evacuated at 800, but this figure was later revised downwards by James Le Mesurier – the former MI6 officer and mercenary who founded the White Helmets group in Turkey in 2013. Vanessa Beeley covered Le Mesurier’s role here in 2015.

But the confusion of numbers, while it could be a simple mistake, could also be indicative of the real number being deliberately downplayed.

At any rate, given all of this effort both to build up their ‘brand’ for the last two years – and now to rescue them from Syria – it’s a safe bet that we haven’t seen the last of the ‘White Helmets’.

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Thought you should know that when I shared this on Facebook they blocked it as Spam. Naturally I’ve told them it’s not but not had a response yet. Also when I went to your page to get a link to this site, then clicked it, Facebook decided to warn me:

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We believe the link you are trying to visit is malicious. For your safety, we have blocked it.

Media seem to be on a purging spree now – just this week a news blog I follow (Wings Over Scotland) had their YouTube account deleted for copyright infringement – instigated by none other than the BBC. Ironically they objected to them sharing clips, one of an interview the blogger did on BBC Scotland Sunday Politics (apparently you can’t even share your own television appearance without upsetting the BBC).

Well, I *am* very malicious, I guess 🙂 Sometimes FB won’t even let me post my own articles. As for You Tube, I am baffled at what they allow to be left up compared to what they take down. The BBC infringement thing is extraordinary, if the person was trying to share their own appearance. I have definitely noticed that YouTube takes down a lot of Leftist conspiracy theorists, but allows right-wing conspiracy people to flourish.

Excellent questions raised and points made in the above post. We read recently that Britain did not accept any Syrian Christian refugees, yet these Christians in Syria were especially targeted by ISIS (which was funded by UAE and others).

Britain barely accepted any Syrian refugees of any kind. I suspect – and hope – that Syrian Christian refugees might soon return to Syria now that the regime has restored most of those towns and cities.

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